‘I think I will be searching for answers for the rest of my life’
THE letter was buried in a pile of mail that had gathered on Nessa Mary McGuinness’s doormat while she had been on a visit to her brothers in the US. She googled “Tusla”, unaware it was the child and family agency. The rest of the letter was equally mysterious.
“They had identified some important information which was personal to me and of a sensitive nature and asked if I wanted to contact them and if I didn’t, I didn’t have to. Curiosity killed the cat,” Nessa Mary said.
It was March 3, 2019, and her life would never be the same again. Four days later, two social workers flew to Cornwall, went to her home and effectively told her she was not who she thought she was.
The couple named on her birth certificate were not her birth parents, they adopted her through the former St Patrick’s Guild Catholic Adoption Society, operated by the Religious Sisters of Charity. Her birth had been illegally registered and she had been illegally adopted.
She was told her birth mother was alive, but had not responded to Tusla’s attempts to contact her. Nessa Mary was not told who she was.
“They handed me an index card with her first name on it and where she was from, and that was it,” she said. She struggled to believe what she was being told. “I just thought it’s not possible that my parents could have done that.”
Born in Dublin to a middle-class Catholic family, the only girl among boys, Nessa Mary moved to the UK after she married, had a family of her own and now lives in Cornwall. She had no inkling she was adopted.
She thinks her mother may have wanted to balance out what up to then had been a family of boys. She suspects the late Professor Éamon de Valera, a consultant gynaecologist and son of the former president, may have helped her. He was named as facilitating four illegal adoptions on the RTE Investigates programme last Wednesday. Nessa Mary’s was not one of those cases, but her mother was his secretary until her marriage in 1960, and he remained her gynaecologist and a family friend.
Looking back, she can remember a Sisters of Charity nun coming to their home in Dublin every month “to ask how I was doing”. With her parents no longer alive, she has no one to ask.
Her mother’s surviving relatives and friends were as astonished as Nessa Mary was to discover she was adopted. “You just feel lost,” she said. “I think I will be searching for the rest of my life for answers that I probably will never get.”
The index card from St Patrick’s Guild gives the barest details. Nessa Mary was born on March 13 or 14, 1964, at St Rita’s Mother and Baby Home owned by Mary Keating, a nurse who would be charged the following year with falsifying birth certificates.
She was transferred to St Patrick’s Infant Hospital to await adoption. The nuns charged her mother a “£2 weekly” fee until she was adopted. Her mother was 25, her father 40 and listed as a married publican. His name was redacted from Nessa Mary’s Tusla file. She was taken home by the couple she knew and loved as her mother and father on March 23, 1964, a date she was always told was her birthday.
“I don’t even know when I was born,” she said.
Nessa Mary lies awake trying to unravel the lies, thinking of “silly little things” like the times she was told she looked like her mother. She feels “a victim of deceit and lies”, but blames the rigid “church and State” and not her parents.
She spends hours on genealogy websites that offer DNA services to trace family connections. She has found her father’s relatives this way, discovering three half-sisters and a brother.
Nessa Mary has since received her birth mother’s surname from Tusla. She believes she does not want contact, but Nessa Mary would like to meet her.
“I would like to know the date I was born. I would like to know if there’s someone in this world that actually looks like me, and I’d also like to know the medical information I have never had, to pass on to my children,” she said.
“In my heart, I don’t believe she will be looking for me, and I have no problem with that, but I would like to know who she is. If I could say anything to her, it would be that I would like to meet her and to thank her for bringing me into the world and that I had a good life.”
‘I would like to meet her to thank her for bringing me into the world’